Government adviser on LightSquared stays despite allegations

Despite his financial stake in a company at the center of a public lobbying campaign against LightSquared, a key adviser to the government on the controversial broadband company’s plans won’t step down.

“This issue is way too important for me to back off,” Bradford Parkinson, a Stanford professor and GPS expert, wrote in an email.

Text Size

POLITICO 44

Parkinson, the vice chairman of a federal advisory board the government relies on to understand GPS matters, has been accused of putting his financial interests above his scientific analysis.

The reason: Parkinson also has a multimillion dollar financial stake in Trimble, a GPS manufacturing company at the heart of a campaign aiming to derail LightSquared from entering the market.

In a recent story, POLITICO described the issue surrounding Parkinson’s advisory role on LightSquared and his ties to Trimble.

Still, Parkinson maintains that his only loyalty is to protecting GPS, which could be harmed by LightSquared’s planned broadband network.

“My objective is to protect the [GPS] users and I have a 39-year track record of doing exactly that,” Parkinson wrote. He is considered to be one of the founding architects of GPS.

Parkinson said he has not wielded undue influence on the LightSquared matter despite his role on the federal advisory board, called the Space-Based Positioning, Navigation, and Timing Advisory Board.

“The position of the board that LightSquared was a grave threat was unanimously concluded at a session that I did not even attend,” Parkinson wrote.

But the minutes of the two-day meeting, available online, indicate that Parkinson was present when LightSquared was discussed.

“Not only did Dr. Parkinson attend the most important PNT Advisory Board meeting on the LightSquared matter in June,” said Terry Neal, a spokesman for the broadband company, “he gave a LightSquared representative a very public grilling.”

As a board member of Trimble, Parkinson has a fiduciary responsibility to protect the shareholders of the company, Neal said, and “cannot possibly be considered an objective source of information.”

If Parkinson “was serious about being independent, he would resign from one of his two positions,” Neal added.

Parkinson said — and a government official confirmed — that he attended only the first day of the two-day advisory board meeting. He said he missed the session when the panel developed a resolution advising the FCC to reassign LightSquared to different airwaves that won’t disrupt GPS.

“There were roughly 20 people at the session from a wide array of backgrounds and technical capabilities,” Parkinson wrote. “I am very proud to say that I do not believe any of them could be swayed to vote against their conscience.”

However, the LightSquared issue was also debated on the day Parkinson attended. Minutes of that meeting chronicle Parkinson giving his opinion on the matter and engaging in a back-and-forth with Jeff Carlisle, head of regulatory affairs for the broadband company, who presented at the meeting.

Under the right circumstances, the highly credentialed academic would support LightSquared moving forward.

“We haven’t seen the solutions” and “in our position, we have to be skeptics,” Parkinson said.

LightSquared claims to have developed at least a partial solution to the interference problems through a partnership with JAVAD GNSS, another GPS manufacturer. Javad Ashjaee, head of the company, has argued publicly that a technical fix already exists.

But in Parkinson’s view, more rigorous and independent testing is needed. If that was conducted and the GPS community was given enough time to retool its equipment — a process Parkinson estimated might take five to 10 years — then he and the PNT advisory board could get behind it.

“The GPS community is willing to adjust,” Parkinson said, “but not with a gun at their head where you are allowed to pull the trigger tomorrow.”

LightSquared representatives say the company already has undergone the most exhaustive regime of testing in the history of interference issues. Some in the GPS field, though, say they simply underestimate how much is necessary.

Lawmakers and telecom industry officials have been reluctant to weigh in on the Parkinson situation, saying privately that it’s either too technical or too sensitive politically.

But Harold Feld, the legal director of the public interest group Public Knowledge, said the conflict is black-and-white.

“Trimble has been one of the chief architects of the whole campaign against LightSquared, and [Parkinson], as the director, would certainly have been aware of that,” said Harold Feld, legal director for Public Knowledge. “It is deeply disturbing to see this kind of conflict of interest.”

This article first appeared on POLITICO Pro at 5:35 a.m. on October 27, 2011.

So, I am confused. Unless this a public admission by Lightsquared that its intended plan does indeed pose a threat to GPS use, I fail to see how Professor Parkinson's position on the advisory board constitutes a conflict.

Lightsquared first tried to insist that their service would not compromise any GPS usage and that no testing was needed--luckily, this position did not win the day and initial testing proved their assertion to be false. They now say that with their revised plan only a minimal number of high precision GPS devices will potentially have interference--and furthermore, they claim to have one or more inexpensive solutions for these GPS devices that they and their partners were able to design, fabricate and test in a matter of weeks, such that they are perfectly confident that all interference issues have been resolved.

If this is the case, why hire all the new lobbyists over the past weeks and, more importantly, why initiate a smear campaign against Professor Parkinson? If Lightsquared even believed its own hype--and believed that they do have a very cost-effective solution to the GPS interference issues, how could they attack Professor Parkinson for having an investment in Trimble--Trimble is not their competitor--Trimble only stands to lose real money if (i) Lightsquared is allowed to proceed, (ii) major GPS interference issues actually exist and (iii) the solutions, if any, are more difficult to implement and expensive than Lightsquared will admit and they will not pay for them.

I am not a scientist or spectrum expert, nor do I have any stake in this situation one way or another--I just have been following this story with interest over the past year and do not like folks that play fast and loose with the truth--and in my estimation this is what Lightsquared is doing.